Critics at Large | The New Yorker
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Critics at Large | The New Yorker
Critics at Large is a weekly culture podcast from The New Yorker. Every Thursday, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss current obsessions, classic texts they’re revisiting with fresh eyes, and trends that are emerging across books, television, film, and more...
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I Need a Critic: One-Hundredth-Episode Edition
Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz celebrate the one-hundredth episode of Critics at Large with a special installment of the podcast...
Why Football Matters
Someone looking to understand America might do well to study the nation’s embrace of football. N.F.L. games regularly outperform anything else on tele...
Do We Need Saints?
In “The Testament of Ann Lee,” a new film directed by Mona Fastvold, Amanda Seyfried plays the founder and leader of the Shaker movement—a woman belie...
Our Romance with Jane Austen
Though Jane Austen went largely unrecognized in her own lifetime—four of her six novels were published anonymously, and the other two only after her d...
The Year of the Broken Mirror
Many of this year’s most talked-about releases were, in some sense, diagnostic: from Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” to Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle Af...
“Wake Up Dead Man” and the Whodunnit Renaissance
We all know the formula: it begins with a dead body, and quickly introduces a motley crew of outlandish characters, each with a motive for murder. The...
Does “Hamlet” Need a Backstory?
Since it was penned more than four hundred years ago, Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” has been in production nearly continuously, and has been adapted in many...
After “Wicked,” What Do We Want from the Musical?
The American musical is in a state of flux. Today’s Broadway offerings are mostly jukebox musicals and blatant I.P. grabs; original ideas are few and...
In “Pluribus,” Utopia Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be
Vince Gilligan’s new show, “Pluribus,” opens with an unconventional apocalypse. A benevolent alien hive mind descends on Earth, commandeering the bodi...
The Guilty Pleasure of the Heist
On October 19th, a group of masked men broke into the Louvre in broad daylight and made off with some of France’s crown jewels. Suspects are now in cu...
Critics at Large Live: Padma Lakshmi’s Expansive Taste
Padma Lakshmi is unquestionably a woman of taste. As a host of the beloved food-competition series “Top Chef” and the star of the culinary docuseries...
Why Horror Still Haunts Us
Horror movies are big business: this year, they’ve accounted for more ticket sales in the U.S. than comedies and dramas combined, bringing in over a b...
In the Dark: Blood Relatives, Episode 1
On August 7, 1985, five family members were shot dead in their English country manor, Whitehouse Farm. It looked like an open-and-shut case. But the N...
Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Generative A.I., once an uncanny novelty, is now being used to create not only images and videos but entire “artists.” Its boosters claim that the tec...
I Need a Critic: October, 2025, Edition
In the latest installment of the Critics at Large advice series, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz answer listeners’ questions abou...
How the Trad Wife Took Over
Scrutiny of the figure of the “trad wife” has hit a fever pitch. These influencers’ accounts feature kempt, feminine women embracing hyper-traditional...
One Paul Thomas Anderson Film After Another
Over the course of his three-decade career, the director Paul Thomas Anderson has dramatized the nineteen-seventies porn industry (“Boogie Nights”), t...
What's Cooking?
In contemporary cookbooks—and in the burgeoning realm of online cooking content—there’s often a life style on display alongside the recipes. Samin Nos...
“The Paper,” “The Lowdown,” and the Drama of Journalism
In the past twenty years, more than a third of all American newspapers have shuttered; trust in media institutions is now at a historic low. And yet w...
Why We're All In on Gambling
Last week, it was announced that Polymarket—a site where you can bet on basically anything, from the likelihood of a government shutdown to the winner...
Our Fads, Ourselves
Though the character known as Labubu has been around for a decade, the toy version—around six inches tall, sporting bunny ears and a demonic grin—is o...
How to Watch a Movie
In the early days of the Hollywood studio system, producers exerted far greater creative control than any individual director. Then, in the mid-twenti...
Les Américains à Paris
Nineteenth-century Americans regarded Paris as a libertine paradise: a smorgasbord of food and fashion, of night life and sex. Today, the pull toward...
How Zohran Mamdani Became the Main Character of New York City
On paper, a thirty-three-year-old socialist would seem an unlikely contender for mayor of New York City. But Zohran Mamdani’s campaign proved compelli...
Late Night's Last Laugh
Two weeks ago, when Paramount cancelled “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” insiders in Hollywood and Washington alike deemed the move suspicious: C...
“Eddington” and the American Berserk
Ari Aster’s wildly divisive new movie “Eddington” drops audiences back into the chaos of May, 2020: a moment when the confluence of the COVID-19 pande...
“Materialists,” “Too Much,” and the Modern Rom-Com
Audiences have been bemoaning the death of the romantic comedy for years, but the genre persists—albeit often in a different form from the screwballs...
Why We Travel
It’s a confusing time to travel. Tourism is projected to hit record-breaking levels this year, and its toll on the culture and ecosystems of popular v...
The Diva Is Dead, Long Live the Diva
The word “diva” comes from the world of opera, where divinely talented singers have enraptured audiences for centuries. But preternatural gifts often...
Why We Turn Grief Into Art
Yiyun Li’s “Things in Nature Merely Grow” is a bracingly candid memoir of profound loss: one written in the wake of her son James’s death by suicide,...
Our Romance with Jane Austen
Though Jane Austen went largely unrecognized in her own lifetime—four of her six novels were published anonymously, and the other two only after her d...
“Mountainhead” and the Age of the Pathetic Billionaire
“Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong’s latest work, a ripped-from-the-headlines sendup of tech billionaires called “Mountainhead,” is arguably an exte...
Lessons from “Sesame Street”
“Sesame Street,” which first aired on PBS in 1969, was born of a progressive idea: that children from all socioeconomic backgrounds should have acces...
The Season for Obsessions
There’s arguably no better time for falling down a cultural rabbit hole than the languid, transitory summer months. On this episode of Critics at Larg...
The Grand Spectacle of Pope Week
In the weeks since Pope Francis’s passing, the internet has been flooded by papal memes, election analysis, and even close readings of the newly appoi...
I Need a Critic: May 2025 Edition
In a new installment of the Critics at Large advice hotline, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz field calls from listeners on a vari...
How “Sinners” Revives the Vampire
The vampire has long been a way to explore the shadow side of society, and “Sinners,” Ryan Coogler’s new blockbuster set in the Jim Crow-era South, is...
War Movies: What Are They Good For?
For nearly as long as we’ve been waging war, we’ve sought ways to chronicle it. “Warfare,” a new movie co-directed by the filmmaker Alex Garland and t...
“The Studio” Pokes Fun at Hollywood’s Existential Struggle
The tension between art and commerce is a tale as old as time, and perhaps the most dramatic clashes in recent history have played out in Hollywood. O...
Gossip, Then and Now
Gossip, an essential human pastime, is full of contradictions. It has the potential to be as destructive to its subjects as it is titillating to its p...